Abstract
Nowadays, hospitals in Germany and other European countries are faced with substantial economic challenges stemming from increased costs and increased demands inter alia resulting from a changing age pyramid. In this respect, patient scheduling is an interesting parameter that determines on the one hand the length of the patients stay in the hospital and the efficiency of the hospital resource allocation on the other hand. Due to the specific characteristics of hospitals such as unexpectedly arriving emergencies or unintended complications during treatments the optimization of patient scheduling is an extraordinary difficult task that cannot be easily solved using a typical centralized optimization algorithm. Thus, in this chapter a decentralized agent based approach is presented that represents patients as well as hospital resources as agents with individual goals that negotiate to find appropriate solutions. The approach has been extensively studied within the MedPAge project and also has been implemented using an agent platform. In this work it will be shown how the traditional message based implementation, which was difficult to construct and even more difficult to maintain, can be replaced with a service based design.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bellifemine, F., Caire, G., Greenwood, D.: Developing Multi-Agent systems with JADE. Wiley, New York (2007)
Braubach, L., Pokahr, A.: Addressing challenges of distributed systems using active components. In: Brazier, F., Nieuwenhuis, K., Pavlin, G., Warnier, M., Badica C. (eds.) Intelligent Distributed Computing V—Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing (IDC 2011), pp. 141–151. Springer (2011).
Braubach, L., Pokahr, A.: Method calls not considered harmful for agent interactions. Int. Trans. Syst. Sci. Appl. (ITSSA) 1/2(7), 51–69 (2011)
Braubach, L., Pokahr, A., Lamersdorf, W.: MedPAge: Rationale Agenten zur Patientensteuerung. Knstliche Intelligenz 2, 33–36 (2004)
Dept of Veteran’s Affairs, Australia: Clinical pathway manual for geriatric community nursing. www.dva.gov.au/health/provider/provider.htm (2000)
Paulussen, T.: Agent-based patient scheduling in hospitals. Ph.D. thesis, Universitt Mannheim (2005)
Paulussen, T., Zller, A., Rothlauf, F., Heinzl, A., Braubach, L., Pokahr, A., Lamersdorf, W.: Agent-based patient scheduling in hospitals. In: Kirn, S., Herzog, O., Lockemann, P., Spaniol, O. (eds.) Multiagent Engineering—Theory and Applications in Enterprises, pp. 255–275. Springer, Berlin (2006)
Paulussen, T.O., Heinzl, A., Rothlauf, F.: Konzeption eines koordinationsmechanismus zur dezentralen ablaufplanung in medizinischen behandlungspfaden (medpaco). In: 5. Internationale Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik 2001, pp. 867–880. Physica, Heidelberg (2001).
Paulussen, T.O., Zller, A., Heinzl, A., Pokahr, A., Braubach, L., Lamersdorf, W.: Dynamic patient scheduling in hospitals. In: Bichler, M., Holtmann, C., Kirn, S., Mller, J., Weinhardt, C. (eds.) Coordination and Agent Technology in Value Networks. GITO, Berlin (2004)
Pokahr, A., Braubach, L.: Active components: A software paradigm for distributed systems. In: Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT 2011). IEEE Computer Society (2011).
Pokahr, A., Braubach, L., Lamersdorf, W.: Jadex: A BDI reasoning engine. In: Bordini, R., Dastani, M., Dix, J., El Fallah Seghrouchni, A. (eds.) Multi-Agent Programming: Languages, Platforms and Applications, pp. 149–174. Springer, Berlin (2005)
Pokahr, A., Braubach, L., Sudeikat, J., Renz, W., Lamersdorf, W.: Simulation and implementation of logistics systems based on agent technology. In: Blecker, T., Kersten, W., Gertz, C. (eds.) Hamburg International Conference on Logistics (HICL’08): Logistics Networks and Nodes, pp. 291–308. Erich Schmidt Verlag (2008)
Sutter, H., Larus, J.: Software and the concurrency revolution. ACM Queue 3(7), 54–62 (2005)
Zller, A., Braubach, L., Pokahr, A., Rothlauf, F., Paulussen, T.O., Lamersdorf, W., Heinzl, A.: Evaluation of a multi-agent system for hospital patient scheduling. Int. Trans. Syst. Sci. Appl. (ITSSA) 1, 375–380 (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Braubach, L., Pokahr, A., Lamersdorf, W. (2014). Negotiation-Based Patient Scheduling in Hospitals. In: Iantovics, B., Kountchev, R. (eds) Advanced Intelligent Computational Technologies and Decision Support Systems. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 486. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00467-9_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00467-9_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-00466-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-00467-9
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)